The land’s people were informed, although belatedly, about a vision to be achieved. The Union Ministry of Urban Development launched Swachh Bharat Mission on Oct. 2, 2014 to bring about 4,000 towns and cities under the mission’s ambit. Essentially, the vision is to clean up the streets, roads, infrastructure of India’s cities, not to forget their open spaces, with rural areas not much in focus. As if to exhort the respective urban local bodies and their resident populations to take part in the campaign with unbounded enthusiasm, the cities were ranked, bestowing the cleanest city badge to the city earning the top rank. The honour fell into the lap of Mysuru city for two consecutive years at the start of the mission. While the city could bag only the fifth rank during the mission’s third year, Mysuru missed scoring a hat-trick, Indore city in Madhya Pradesh taking its place on the victory stand. The mission’s fever has only made the competition among the participating cities across the country keener.

Not being aware of the consequences of living in insanitary environment both within the confines of residences and outside the homes, particularly extending an open invitation to many common diseases, people are paying a heavy price of losing strength to carry on physical as well as mental activities, imbibing the attitude of keeping living spaces clean has to first began at home and then in the school.

Residents of Mysuru, similar to their counterparts in the rest of the country, have been at both the giving and receiving ends in the battle or reining in the plastic menace. The civic body and its staff deployed on collecting domestic residue at the doorsteps in all the 65 Wards of Mysuru deserve more support from the householders than so far, given the feature of domestic helps not changing their time-worn habit of tossing garbage-filled plastic bags on the roadsides. Separating biodegradable component of domestic residue at the time the civic staff collects the material as a habit is slowly catching up in most wards across the city. The more serious situation in the city, namely dumping the debris of demolished old houses in untenanted locations around the city doesn’t seem to have been dealt with an iron hand by the authorities.

The rapidly rising pace of razing old buildings to raise high-rise structures in all cities, including Mysuru, has far outstripped the plans of keeping urban spaces free from mountains of debris. The ongoing trend of cities getting overcrowded and shrinking land area to construct new buildings and also dump the debris in its raw state finds the urbanites between the devil and the deep sea as it were.